Buenos Aires: What can we learn from 8 years of contract data?

What does the City of Buenos Aires spend its money on?

At Argentina Abierta, the city of Buenos Aires shared its new data on public contracts in the Open Contracting Data Standard (OCDS) format. The data covers purchases from 2011 to 2018 – 24,510 hiring processes with 64,336 contracts for goods and services – and is set to be updated every 15 days (public works aren’t included for now, but data on them is available at www.buenosaires.gob.ar/baobras).

We hope this data will be useful for civil society, journalists and even the government itself.

The journey

This has not been an easy journey. The City of Buenos Aires has been promoting transparency initiatives for several years. The launch of the open data portal (data.buenosaires.gob.ar) in 2012 was a major milestone, while another took place in 2016, when a commitment was made to increase transparency, with the approval of a new law to strengthen access to information.

To make the data more interoperable and reusable, the city began looking into the OCDS schema. After contacting the OCDS helpdesk in March 2018, the government started mapping its data to the data standard and progress was fast, despite the project team within the government changing. After months of effort and support from our helpdesk to review and structure the data, Buenos Aires started publishing OCDS data.

Some of the technical aspects of publishing data in JSON, the standard format for OCDS, seemed daunting at first, so Buenos Aires decided OCDS CSV publication would be more feasible and easier to implement. Also, the government had already used the CSV format to publish its data, so they focused on using CSV for the serialization, following the format established by the OCDS, and then using a conversion tool from CSV to JSON. This allowed them to publish in both formats, and cater to the needs of a greater variety of users. This is a great example for sub-national or smaller governments that have limited publication capabilities. As the CSV data is also in standard format you can use the existing tool to publish the data in JSON, as Buenos Aires did, making your data more interoperable and easily consumed by OCDS applications.

But the journey won’t end here. The data is not perfect; the quality can still be improved, and data on public works contracts could be added. Publication must be done regularly, with the same quality criteria to keep the data up-to-date and useful.

The data and its uses

The published data corresponds to the Buenos Aires Purchasing System, which has been used since 2011, with the biggest increase in purchases through the system occurring in 2015.

Number of processes published per year from 2011 to 2018

The data covers the tender stage to the contracting stage, including details about dates of the tender, award and contract, amounts, items and suppliers awarded and contracting entities. In total, data on 428 government entities, and 3108 winning suppliers have been published.

OCDS sections published

Top 10 contracting entities with the most processes

Top 10 suppliers with the most contracts

Using the OCDS, our initial question – what does the government spend most on – can be answered more easily and accurately. The data standard promotes the publication of the units of measure, unique identifiers and quantities of the items to be purchased, as well as the amounts together with its corresponding currency, ensuring that the sums and calculations build on data comparable to each other.

If no standard were used, it would be more difficult to identify each item, since neither the identifiers nor the currency would be published. With the standard, we only had to group the items by their identifiers and currency and we were able to calculate the totals.

The most popular items purchased were food assistance services, meal preparation and distribution (breakfast), security and cleaning services, technical and professional services, and school meals, as shown in the following table:

For the same reasons mentioned previously, now with the use of a standard for the publication of the data, these fields allow you to measure indicators to detect red flags in hiring processes that can help prevent corrupt practices. These include:

Associated Scheme

Red Flag

Corruption; Excluding qualified bidders

Short or inadequate notice to bidders to submit expression of interest or prepare bids

Structured data can help increase competition in purchasing processes, because an interested supplier could search what the government wants to buy in a specific timeframe and understand how to make a more accurate a bid based on the historical prices.

Distribution of procurement methods used

It is also possible to conduct historical analyses of purchases to improve future procurements.

These are just some of the potential use cases and impacts from publishing OCDS data on these contracts, which are worth 52 billion Argentine pesos, 14 million euros, and 62 million dollars in total over the years published. We hope that this impact will be reflected soon.

The journey never ends with putting data out there and hoping for someone to use it. Thinking hard about how the data might be analyzed is crucial for it to be useful. We’ve highlighted some ideas here.

If you want to make this impact yourself, and want to use this data for monitoring and analysis, you can find some helpful guides and tools for data use below, and feel free to get in touch [link to data@open-contracting] with us: